Merging
Merging takes all the commits on the target branch and applies those changes to current branch. This results in a single new commit being created on the current branch and the history of those commits being condensed down into a single history entry.
merge setup showing branch to be merged
Once we perform the Merge we get our new commit appended to the current branch
State of play after merge has been completed
One thing to note about merging is that it will create a branch in the history (compared to a rebase which will not). This can be seen below
State of play after merge has been completed